Introduction: “A Cemetery Inhabited by Highly Vocal Ghosts”

This book explores how Shakespeare’s plays use ideas of blackness and specifically ideas about black women in order to make whiteness and white femininity visible and valuable. The introduction outlines some of the historical circumstances that worked to make black women invisible within the archive of the transatlantic slave trade beginning during Shakespeare’s lifetime, circumstances that would come to augment the habits of erasure already evident in his plays. After a brief review of the critical history of early modern race studies, the introduction discusses Toni Morrison’s 2012 Desdemona, which imagines the interactions of Othello’s female characters—ones who appear in the play as well as some who do not—in an effort to tell the parts of stories about race and women that Shakespeare leaves out. The introduction finishes with brief descriptions of each of the book’s chapters.